Restoring Glory

This story appears in the Summer Issue of SCOREGolf Magazine available now.

If he weren’t so busy Ian Andrew would make one heck of a picker.

The studious Brantford, Ont.-based golf course architect takes great delight in uncovering rare artifacts, a passion that’s morphed from a curiosity-quenching hobby to a necessary, refined-over-the-years skill as he takes on more and more restoration projects.

So you can imagine the smile that spread across his face when upon rummaging through some lockers at Pennsylvania’s Pennhills Club, pulling out old oil cans and other junk, he first discovered Clifford Wendenhack’s clubhouse blueprints (Wendenhack being the most influential clubhouse architect of the early 20th century) and inside of those, Walter J. Travis’s original rag linen drawings of the club’s nine-hole golf course. It was a massive find, and gave Andrew a stencil to follow when bringing Pennhills back to its origins.

In a day and age when new golf course construction has slowed significantly, restoration work — literally returning a significantly changed golf course back to its original design as closely as possible — has become more prevalent, and was ignited by the well-documented tree removal at U.S. Open host Oakmont.

Designed as a wide-open layout by Henry Fownes in 1903, Oakmont saw some 7,500 trees planted on its property in the 1960s at the behest of then club president Fred Brand. He did so to beautify the course, however the trees not only changed Oakmont’s spirit, they damaged its turf by blocking out valuable sunlight. Thirty years later, new president Banks Smith began an overnight and covert tree removal operation that slowly but surely returned Oakmont to the golf course Fownes had intended. The controversial project was universally lauded, and the praise gave other clubs the green light to do the same.

“Tree removal at Oakmont changed everything for architects,” said Andrew. “We all dine off of it. It’s like holding a pair of aces at all times during a poker game.” Of Banks Smith, Andrew said: “If I ever meet him I’d give him a hug.”

Andrew’s first official restorative work came at the Travis-designed Lookout Point near Niagara Falls, Ont., in the mid-1990s. It was a partial restoration and upon being hired for the work he asked the club for six months to research the architect. At the time he was more familiar with acclaimed Canadian designer Stanley Thompson and had been actively saving little bits of Thompson courses here and there while working for Doug Carrick.

He subsequently landed gigs at Thompson courses Kawartha G&CC near Peterborough, Ont., and Cutten Fields in Guelph, Ont., and says his ability to replicate original layouts got better as he improved his research skills. The Internet became a godsend and Andrew learned not only where to find course drawings, but also aerial photos that over the years had been donated to clubs or to the Stanley Thompson Society at the University of Guelph.

Andrew’s most important project — and perhaps the most notable in Canada — was the bunker restoration at Toronto’s St. George’s G&CC. Over the years the famed club had seen its highly artistic Thompson bunkers either removed altogether or, for lack of a better word, bastardized to ease maintenance work and costs.

However the advent of such things as bunker cloth made proper maintenance of any bunker, however wild, possible, and former St. George’s superintendent John Gall pushed for a restoration, hiring Andrew because he knew other architects would stray from the plan and try to leave their own mark.

“Ian is just not like that,” Gall explained. “He’s all about getting it right.”

Armed with old photos from the club and Thompson’s archives, and from newspaper microfiche clippings, such as a Toronto Star photo of the 11th hole, Andrew and the club’s crew painstakingly went about restoring almost all of Thompson’s original bunkers. A bunker 180 yards off the tee in the middle of the fairway valley on the fifth hole was not replicated because it would have drastically slowed pace of play. Such decisions to occasionally stray from historical documents are termed “sympathetic restorations” because it is rare, or sometimes impossible or impractical, to recreate everything to the letter. In any event, the end result at St. George’s is stunning and was groundbreaking in Canada.

“I felt the weight of the world when I did St. George’s,” said Andrew. “I felt like everything was on me. I’ve never felt more pressure than when I did that job before and since. I felt like it was historically really important and the details matter.”

Why have restorations, or partial restorations, become necessary? In other words, why were such great courses changed in the first place? Oftentimes it was to keep up with changing golf equipment technology to remain relevant. Sometimes it was because Mother Nature had her way. Sometimes it was because of understandable maintenance reasons like at St. George’s. And sometimes it was simply a result of the era. Post-Second World War, everything became mechanized and modern, and everybody wanted everything sleek and streamlined, whether it was their homes or their automobiles. Golf courses were no different and so well-intentioned upgrades were made. Things got really over the top in the go-go ’80s, and it wasn’t until the work at Oakmont or someone noticing that the spectacular Chicago Golf Club — the oldest 18-holer in North America — had gone unchanged over the years that an appreciation for the architecture of old began to take hold. Society has seen that too. Look at real estate and the high demand for century homes in many Canadian markets, find here the exact location of the development.

Courtesy Victoria GC/Jeff MingayAt Victoria GC, Jeff Mingay’s focus was to recreate the bunker style of A.V. Macan from the early 20th century.

Such was the case at Victoria Golf Club, situated on a tiny parcel of land adjacent to the Pacific Ocean. With no room to expand or renovate, club members were convinced of the value of a restoration when architect Jeff Mingay was hired to do some work on the second hole and proposed staying true to A.V. Macan’s style. The club had been working with another firm on a bunker project and grew more and more uncomfortable with what was being proposed. It had more of a 1980s look to it, said general manager Scott Kolb, so Victoria put a restoration project out to tender and ultimately rewarded Mingay with the job.

“Some of the others, they weren’t going to call it a restoration, whereas Jeff said, ‘This is a Macan golf course, I’m just going to be a consulting architect to make sure it’s still a Macan golf course,’” said Kolb. “Some of the others were going to put their own stamp on it.”

Mingay took that approach due to his deep admiration of Macan’s work, and he’s an expert on the architect the same way that Andrew is on Thompson and that Martin Hawtree, who restored Toronto Golf Club, is on that club’s designer, Harry Colt.

Fondness and thorough knowledge for a course’s original designer is very valuable for a modern-day architect looking to land a restoration project, which is how Andrew came to work at Thompson’s Cape Breton Highlands, a 1941 creation that had lost its way over the years due to turf problems and a poorly received 1990s renovation that saw bunkers added or changed and an unappealing cart path implemented.

Courtesy Cape Breton Highlands/Ian AndrewThe bunkers at Cape Breton Highlands (15th hole shown) are now much more like Stanley Thompson’s in 1940 than after a poorly received renovation in the 1990s.

Cape Breton native Graham Hudson, whose father was a member at the course for 50 years and told stories of it during supper hour, became the general manager at Highlands in 2007. He immediately called for a symposium on the club’s state that included Andrew, and was informed that tree overgrowth was the prime culprit in the club’s conditioning struggle. Thousands upon thousands needed to be removed. When a tender to restore the course was put out, Andrew severely lowballed his offer to ensure he got the job. After all, Cape Breton Highlands was the “first great golf course” that Andrew ever played, which he did so alongside his father as a teenager during a family vacation. Money, however, wasn’t the only reason Andrew got the gig.

“There were four other bidders and even taking the dollars and cents out of the equation, all of the other four wanted to tweak the course,” explained Hudson. “And Ian said absolutely not. He said, ‘I will follow to the letter what Mr. Thompson did and the spirit of what Mr. Thompson did.’ He said, ‘I’m not here to modernize it. I’m not here to put my name on something. I’m here to restore this.’ And I said, ‘That’s it, that’s what I want.’”

While Andrew’s passion for Highlands derives both from a childhood experience and his reverence for Stanley Thompson, Hudson’s comes from knowing how important the course is to tiny Ingonish Beach, where it is located within Cape Breton Highlands National Park.

“Knowing that the golf course is the lifeblood of the community and the only way for the community to prosper is for the golf course to prosper,” Hudson said. “There’s a lot of people that have this course on their bucket list even to this day and it’s only fair to give them the course that was intended.”

Where there was some “sympathy” at St. George’s, and usually is during any restoration, such was not the case at Highlands. Judgment on Thompson’s design was removed from the equation so that even if Andrew disagreed with a bunker shape or location, he put it back anyway. A classic example is what’s come to be known as the dragon and fireball bunker on the par-3 fifth, which came to light only after a Stanley Thompson Society member saw Andrew’s work on the architect’s website and provided a better photo.

“I have to admit I felt like a bit of a lunatic doing it but the goal of Highlands, more so than any other place, was just put it back … note for note,” Andrew said. “I find one of the bunkers on 17 to be dull as toast but I put it back the way it was. It’s as flat as it was. It’s as lifeless as it was. But that’s what was there. I can’t judge that.”

The work at Highlands hasn’t been easy. For years Hudson was handcuffed by the limited funds provided by Parks Canada. But since Golf North signed a long-term lease to operate both the golf course and neighbouring Keltic Lodge last year, the restrictions have largely come off and Hudson recently reported that the restoration of Cape Breton Highlands is 98 per cent complete. Asked if all the hard work has been worthwhile, he didn’t hesitate.

“Absolutely. One thousand per cent,” he stated.

What would Thompson think of the work? Or Macan of Victoria? Or Colt of Toronto? What would any architect think about someone devoting time and effort to restore his intentions? Carrick, whose recent work at Summit G&CC was partly restorative, has thought about that question from time to time. He knows somebody else may very well take a scalpel to his creations down the road, perhaps to keep up with the times, and in fact that’s already happened in one instance. But if someone were to restore one of his courses?

“It would be flattering if someone decided to put it back to what it was originally, some of my own work, sure that would be flattering,” Carrick admitted. “But I’m not sure if it would be relevant.”

Carrick may be selling himself short. Among his best designs are the distinct looks of the Hoot and Heathlands courses at Osprey Valley in Caledon, Ont., Eagles Nest in Maple, Ont., the Ridge Course at Predator Ridge Resort in Vernon, B.C., and Humber Valley in Deer Lake, N.L. At some point, maybe 75 years from now, some of his work — and that of Canadian contemporaries such as Thomas McBroom and Rod Whitman — might go beyond being respected and become revered. That’s what’s happened with Thompson, Macan, Colt, et al. And at that point, a restoration might become desirable.